cburgdorf

Even more so because realistically you need to set it up somewhere where electricity is cheap which which is a centralizing force in itself. Also you need to have a really efficient mining rig for it to be profitable. With Ethereum PoS you can easily home stake on a Raspberry Pi which means it is much easier for regular people to participate.

There are a lot of well proven live projects that use external oracle data and haven't suffered any serious issues. Just throwing DAI and RAI out as examples.

There are many smaller scale things happening. Most are financial use cases but I'm trying to stick to non-financial ones here.

There's a platform called royal (https://royal.io/) which lets you fund artists and their albums. You can essentially co-own their song rights and collect a share of the royalties when their music is played. It's getting really interesting once composability comes into play. E.g. you can make indexes of song rights for country, rock, pop, electronic etc. pp. And once you have that you might put other financial derivatives on top and can go 2x long on country music and 2x short on pop music. There interesting aspect is that big music labels always were able to go short on some genre and long on another because they effectively decide which artists to fund. It's just that with these open protocols we the regular people get to do the same directly. And as a fan we get directly rewarded for helping our favorite artist to spread there music.

There are many interesting use cases and platforms emerging in the blockchain world. It just takes time for things to go mainstream.

Let's assume rich countries of the world (e.g. G7) set up a climate change fund in a smart contract. They could just lockup some funds there to be claimable after x months/years for any country (except the G7) proportionally to how far they managed to reduce their CO2 emissions. This assumes that we can trustlessly get the CO2 emissions for all countries (Let's just assume satellites can provide that data in a trustless way to the blockchain via some clever oracle mechanism).

Instead of having a handwritten weak contract like the Paris climate act, you'd have actual enforceable code that can not be gamed. I'm obviously oversimplifying things here but this is just to give an idea how blockchain tech can improve coordination games in the future.

Christoph, founder of the project here. I recently came across the Estonian meaning and jokingly used it as an explanation for the project name when I gave a presentation. However, the real story is that Lahja is the name of my daughter and I selfishly named this project after her :)

Price feeds provide the data. They get normalized (removing extreme values) and I think there's some parameters in regard to sensitivity that they can tweak. The trusted accounts for these feeds are voted by all MKR holders. The overall system is very much like a community run central bank.

MakerDAO is basically a community run central bank on the Ethereum blockchain. You can lock away assets you own (currently only ETH but eventually even your house will work as a collateral). By locking away your collateral you can withdraw DAI which will be generated based on your collateral. This is comparable to how banks worked in the past where they only printed money for which they had gold as collateral.

You need to at least have a collateralization of 150 %. If you fall below that, your collateral will be seized, the same amount of DAI that you own will be bought from the market and burned. The rest of your collateral minus 13 % liquidation fee will be send back to you.

At any time you can pay back your loan in DAI or add more collateral.

This mechanism keeps DAI stable at 1 USD.

The entire mechanism runs entirely on the Ethereum blockchain.

Know why is that cool?

1. You have a 100 % decentralized token that you can keep in any crypto wallet that supports ERC-20 token (Be your own bank)

2. You have a token that isn't volatile so it is safe to pay out salaries or buy groceries with it.

Stablecoins that are pegged to Fiat money like the USD still have one centralized aspect though. The currency that they are pegged to is still controlled by centralized organs (e.g FED, European Central Bank etc).

The cool thing is, this stuff is just getting started. MakerDAO is just a few month old and pegging to the USD is really just the beginning of a new era.

In the long term, imagine you have a stablecoin that is pegged to the purchasing power of North America or Europe or any other region of the world.

It's totally possible. The data feeds are the hardest part but there are solutions for that.

Imagine having a currency that is pegged to the purchasing power of your region without any governmental control. This is where we are heading.

Ah gotcha! Yes, ours will be public, too! We are just too busy ramping lots of things up for the private beta. But we'll definitely have these public.

Would love to get your signup for the private beta to get detailed feedback. Especially given your experience with kaggle.

https://blog.machinelabs.ai/2017/05/11/introducing-machinela...

Christoph from MachineLabs here.

>>Do you have public code for containers as Floydhub has?

Can you elaborate what you mean with that?

>What machines are you using in your cloud? Can I specify the >machine CPUs and RAM size?

We'll have different hardware type categories. At the end it boils down to VPS on Google Cloud Engine running Ubuntu. That said, thinking long-term we'd love to give people access to things like Nvidia Tesla V100.

>Do you have time/memory limit for job execution?

Your experiments can run for as long as you wish (but you'll pay for everything that goes beyond free hours). Memory limits will be defined by the hardware category you chose when you run your lab.

Do you have specific requirements regarding memory or CPU/GPU power? We'd love to learn from people like you what the community needs.